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Paper short abstract:

This conceptual study explores an alternative reading of the exploitation of workers in artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) and the marginalisation of this sector by applying a labour regime analysis to this activity. It also discusses the implications of this insight for future research on ASM.

Paper long abstract:

The boom of artisanal and small-scale mining in regions of the global south, including in Sub-Saharan Africa correlated with the loss of formal employments, and diminishing agriculture productivity presumably due to structural adjustment programs which led to the reduction of state assistance to small farmers. For the practitioners and researchers of rural development who were increasingly familiar with the concept of livelihoods, it almost came as intuitive to conceptualize this expanding activity as alternative livelihood to agriculture. In the 2000s, artisanal miners started to be portrayed as producers of global commodities due to campaigns of NGOs, and transnational civil societies on issues such as conflict minerals from ASM, which established the responsibilities of global actors in the governance of global minerals supply chains. ASM social science research mostly evolved around these two conceptualizations of the sector, namely as “alternative livelihood” and/or “informal producers of global mineral commodity”. The debates building on the two narratives focused respectively on national and sub-national impacts of policy process on ASM livelihood, and on the challenges and inequality in the governance of global value chains. What seems to lack in this research is the consideration of ASM as a field of work and the theorization on its regulation. In this study, I suggest that the concept of labour regime, applied elsewhere, has the potential of explaining the format in which policy regulations and governance norms get institutionalized through the project of controlling ASM workers, but also through their resistance to control.